The work
The work I do is relational and focused on pattern. I don't run intake checklists. I don't assign homework. I pay attention to what happens in the session. The moments when something shifts or goes flat. The pattern that keeps showing up underneath the problem. Most people already know their own story. They still keep landing in the same place. What's missing is someone watching in real time, someone who can name what you cannot see from inside it. More on how I work, and how I work with couples.
What people bring to online therapy
The people I work with in English come for a wide range of reasons: anxiety, depression, stress and burnout, anger management, grief and loss, relationship difficulties, loneliness, self-esteem issues, procrastination, sleep problems, attachment patterns, self-sabotage, perfectionism, identity questions, and existential concerns. Online counseling makes this work possible from wherever you are, whether you need an English-speaking therapist, a virtual counselor, or simply someone who can work in your language at a depth that matters.
How it works
Sessions are online via secure video call. I work with individuals and couples (60 minutes). Before your first session, we have a free 15-minute call to see if this feels like the right fit for you.
Finding a therapist in Austria who works in English at real depth takes real effort. Vienna has more options than other cities, but the pool is still small and the waits are often long. Sustained, exploratory work in English is scarcer still.
I work with anyone who needs support in English and is living in Austria. Relationship trouble. A low you can't quite name. Something you've been managing for a long time. Something that's just surfaced.
Being in Austria
Austria has a particular quality, Vienna especially. It rewards a certain kind of formality and discretion. It's a city where things work well. Showing feeling is not especially encouraged. If you've found that hard to name, that's part of it.
For couples in Vienna, the social world tends to organize around work networks and settled circles. It can feel closed. If any of that texture is part of what brings you, we can work with it. If what you're dealing with has nothing to do with Austria, that's fine.
Vienna, mostly, and the Alpine rest
The international population is overwhelmingly Viennese. The UN and IAEA orbit around Kaisermühlen. The diplomatic belt runs through the 18th and 19th districts. Corporate life sits along the Ring. Graz adds a university-and-industry layer. Innsbruck and Salzburg add seasonal and lifestyle migrants. Vienna itself is regularly crowned the world's most livable city. Its specialty is a paradox every expat here learns. Everything works, and warmth is on back order. That gap between livability and belonging fills a lot of my Austrian hours.
Vienna gets its own treatment: the Vienna page covers the international-organization world and the city specifics.
One more Vienna fact. Bratislava is under an hour from the Hauptbahnhof, and plenty of lives cross that border daily. The Slovak side has its own page: therapy in English in Bratislava.
Country details last reviewed June 2026.
The regulatory point, made carefully
Psychotherapeut is a protected Austrian title and I do not use it or hold it. I am a US-trained therapist working online and privately from outside Austria, by direct arrangement, with no ÖGK involvement and no diagnosis filed anywhere. If a Kassenplatz or the rebate route serves you better, those exist, and the free call costs you nothing but the fifteen minutes it takes to find out.
Austrian mental healthcare: the Kassenplatz lottery and the Wahltherapeut route
Austria takes psychotherapy seriously as a profession (the Psychotherapiegesetz has protected the title for decades, and training is long and rigorous) and funds it grudgingly. There are two public routes. A Kassenplatz, a fully funded therapy slot, costs you nothing and is rationed accordingly: waits of six to eighteen months are normal, longer in some provinces. The realistic route is the Wahltherapeut model: you choose a private therapist, pay the full fee (typically 80 to 170 euros in Vienna), and your insurer rebates a fixed amount per session, currently 33.70 euros from ÖGK, around 50 from SVS and BVAEB, provided you obtain a doctor's confirmation and an approved diagnosis enters your insurance file. From 2026 a new contract also brings clinical-psychological treatment into the Kassen system through a central allocation service, which should ease access for diagnosable conditions, in German, eventually.
Note what the rebate route requires: a formal psychiatric diagnosis in your Austrian insurance record. A meaningful share of Austrians, and most expats I encounter, decline the 33.70 euros precisely to keep therapy off that file. Vienna's private English-speaking pool is respectable by continental standards (the UN ecosystem guarantees that) but the depth-work end of it books out, and outside Vienna the English options drop off fast.
Questions people ask from Austria
Selected research on this approach
My work is psychodynamic and depth-oriented. These are some of the studies on the effectiveness of that kind of therapy. They describe research on the method in general, and are not claims about any individual outcome.
- Shedler, J. (2010). The efficacy of psychodynamic psychotherapy. American Psychologist, 65(2), 98-109. doi:10.1037/a0018378
- Steinert, C., Munder, T., Rabung, S., Hoyer, J., & Leichsenring, F. (2017). Psychodynamic therapy: as efficacious as other empirically supported treatments? A meta-analysis testing equivalence of outcomes. American Journal of Psychiatry, 174(10), 943-953. PMID 28541091
The full reading list is on the approach page.